Abigail Gives Us the Killer Vampire Ballerina Mayhem We Crave but Only in Spurts

I saw the killer ballerina vampire and it was okay.

Abigail’s ad campaign operates at cross-purposes with the film itself. The fright flick devotes much of its running time to setting up a twist that isn’t a twist at all. Not only is the film’s ostensible twist not an actual twist, but it’s also the centerpiece of the film’s marketing campaign. 

Abigail is being sold as a fun horror comedy in which thieves and other professional criminals are tasked with babysitting a little girl for one night in exchange for fifty million dollars. The little girl turns out to be a bloodthirsty vampire. 

It’s understandable why Abigail would want to highlight the ballerina child vampire aspect of its premise, particularly in the aftermath of M3GAN’s breakout success. 

We, as a culture, apparently feel a deep need to see creepy little girls, or robotic simulations of little girls, go on murder sprees.

Abigail, a reimagining of 1936’s Dracula’s Daughter (a movie whose title is also something of a giveaway), revolves around six desperate criminals who come together in a sinister New York mansion at the behest of a shadowy operative played by Giancarlo Esposito. 

As a longtime fan of Esposito, I have enjoyed watching his ascent from respected character actor to superstar/national treasure. The problem with casting an actor as charismatic as Esposito in a film like this, however, is that once audiences get a taste of him, they invariably want more. 

Unfortunately, after setting up the film’s premise, Esposito then disappears for the next 90 minutes. He is missed. 

The criminals’ job is simple: They need to babysit Abigail (Alisha Weir), the ballet-loving daughter of a powerful mobster, for one night in a spooky old mansion in exchange for fifty million dollars. 

Melissa Barrera stars as Joey, the kindest and most maternal of the bad bunch. She’s a mother, former army medic, and recovering drug addict who is tasked with taking care of the creepy little girl in the tutu. 

On the other side of the morality scale lies Frank (Dan Stevens), an ex-cop with a dead-eyed stare who stands out for being particularly creepy and sinister even within a cabal of career criminals. 

They’re joined by perpetually stoned wheelman Dean, who is played by the late Angus Cloud, who died of a drug overdose not long after the film was made and is far too convincing as someone so baked that they’re in a different dimension from everyone else. 

Then there’s Kevin Durand as muscle with a brain full of pudding and gummy bears, newfangled scream queen Kathryn Newton (Lisa Frankenstein) as a tech-savvy child of privilege Sammy and ex-military man Rickles (Will Catlett). 

The sextet of overqualified/homicidal babysitters is supposed to be an impressive aggregation of badasses, tough broads, and all-around seedy characters. They’re supposed to be predators who are shocked and horrified to discover themselves prey. 

But since Abigail is being marketed as a movie where a crazed little girl ballerina greedily devours the flesh and drinks the blood of a cross-section of the criminal underworld, the ostensible twist isn’t anywhere near as surprising, let alone shocking, as it is supposed to be. 

This also means that almost half of the film's bloated one-hundred-and-nine-minute runtime is devoted to waiting for the big reveal. Abigail takes forever to get to the action. 

All I wanted from Abigail was a fun little horror comedy about a little vampire girl in a tutu wreaking unholy havoc on six adults who foolishly think they have the upper hand in the situation when they’re really dead meat.

That is what I eventually got from the film. The road to those sequences was way too long and nowhere near eventful enough. Abigail initially feels like a crime drama or an action movie. It’s supposed to lull us into a false sense of security that what we’re watching is not a horror movie, but the movie’s posters and commercials spoil its non-twist. 

Abigail is not a particularly good movie but it has a terrific villain in its title character. Weir really plays up her character’s ostensible helplessness and vulnerability. She pretends to be a little girl overwhelmed by all of the darkness around her when she’s the darkest soul of all. 

This horror comedy only begins to take off when Abigail stops pretending to be just another cute little girl, and the gleeful carnage begins. 

Abigail takes far too long to get started, and the good part ends far too abruptly, but there are a good twenty minutes when the film realizes the tremendous comic and horror potential of its own-and-dirty premise. 

This is not a film that benefits from a 109-minute runtime, sizable budget, and name cast. Watching it, I wished that were a 65-minute, Charles B. Griffith-written Roger Corman movie filmed in three days on a microscopic budget from 1962 with Dick Miller, Jonathan Haze, Jack Nicholson, and his dentist’s kid daughter in the title role. 

Abigail is just too damn respectable and long for its own good.

Two and a half stars out of five